


Can We Go On Like it Once Was?

by poetofstarlight



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, also its a song fic, i tagged it as major character death bc it's set after newt dies and is abt minho grieving so, inspired by Another Story by The Head and the Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29521533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetofstarlight/pseuds/poetofstarlight
Summary: At night, Newt returns to Minho in dreams.
Relationships: Minho/Newt (Maze Runner)
Kudos: 17





	Can We Go On Like it Once Was?

**Author's Note:**

> hello there! if you're here then i suppose you're ready for a good cry, and a good cry you shall get! (trust me, 1/1 experts agree)
> 
> i couldn't stop thinking abt how much Another Story by the Head and the Heart fits minewt so perfectly so i had to do this. i've woven in lyrics here and there from the song, so obviously the lyrics pulled from the song belong to them. usually i'm not a huge fan of weaving lyrics into fics cuz i feel like it makes it sound clunky but i think it turned out rly nice in this case!
> 
> oh, and the title of the fic is a lyric from the song as well! anywho, happy (or, um, sad) reading!

Minho likes to listen to the waves at night. He sits out on the shore, late into the evening, watching as they crash toward him. There’s something about their noise that makes him feel at home, despite the fact that he still does not, and will never, know what home was.

There was, in what feels more and more like another life with each passing day, a time when Minho thought he knew what home was. Home was the face of a boy, his skin fair but sun-kissed, a wicked grin breaking up his soft features. Home was that boy’s hair as it ruffled in the breeze, wild and fly-away. Home was his laughter, when Minho made stupid jokes just for him, the sound of it bubbling through the air in a pattern that could only be described as _precious._ And home was, for all intents and purposes, that boy’s eyes, so impossibly deep and brown that Minho had only to glance over for the briefest of moments before he was falling straight into them and feeling impossibly safe, impossibly okay.

He tries not to think of the irony of it. Him in the Glade and in the Scorch, frightened but okay because Newt was there with him, but now being here, in the supposed Safe Haven, and feeling so unanchored, so lost, so _not okay_ to the point that, of the memories he does have, he can’t remember a time when he felt less safe.

He’s made up a game to deal with it. Whenever he starts to think about how alone he is here even amongst friends, how alone he forever will be even as they rebuild something of life, he imagines it all belongs to Newt. He’ll be sitting beside Fry or Thomas, letting their idiotic chatter wash over him as he stares into the flames of the firepit, and he thinks _these are just flames, burning in your fireplace._ And then he is in the Glade again, for a moment, watching and teasing as Newt struggles to get the fire going for that night’s dinner shenanigans.

When the waves finally do lull Minho to sleep, Newt returns to him in dreams. It’s always Newt’s voice that returns to him first, smirking and laughing, mocking but irreparably kind-hearted. There is usually a moment—just the shortest of seconds—when Minho’s heart skips a beat, because he can’t see Newt, can’t follow his voice, but then the second is over and Newt is there. His face and his hair and his _eyes_ —his beautiful, beautiful eyes—and of course his lips, and Minho gets to remember how soft those lips are, how loving and teasing, how very distinctly _Newt_ they are. He relearns the geography of Newt’s body, the lines and crevices of his skin, the way his breath changes when Minho touches him just so, the little moan that escapes the soft lips when Minho pulls at them with his own. They are, for the few hours in Minho’s dreams, just like those hungry wolves howling in the night that they were back in the Glade—whooping and shouting breathlessly in the day in anticipation for midnight when they would find one another so that they might kiss and bite at each other until no one could mistake the marks on their necks in the morning (but would do their best to overlook them).

At the end of it, he finds Newt’s hands, and their fingers interlace. That’s when Newt speaks again, and it's so very real, so very Newt, that it seems as if it was all a dream, all a terrible dream that Newt is gone and Minho is here, safe, without him.

 _I wish it was all a dream._ But it’s not. It’s not and it never is, because instead every morning he learns that the real dream was Newt finding him again in the night.

***

The others each have their ways of trying to be there for him. Gally and Fry try to act as normal as possible. Their attempt is a bit sad, but Minho forces himself to find it amusing because nothing about their lives has ever been normal, so there is a bit of comedy in Gally and Fry trying to act as though anything is. Thomas, for his part, remains relatively aloof, which Minho suspects is because he doesn’t really know what to say and is afraid of saying the wrong thing. Minho wishes Thomas would just act—well, there’s that word again, isn’t it?— _normal,_ but he also knows Thomas is in the same boat as Minho, in some ways. Because as Minho carved Newt’s name in the rock, Thomas was there carving Teresa’s.

Then of course there’s Jorge, who’s approach seems to be to talk about the people he himself has lost, in some sort of attempt to communicate to Minho that he is not alone. Minho appreciates this somewhat, because he knows Jorge is only trying to help and he thinks Jorge feels somehow responsible because he knew Newt for those six months Minho was being held captive by WCKD, knew the kid and helped him plan and plot to save Minho only to watch him die like so many others he could never hope to save. But every time Minho hears another story of some poor boy who lost his head that Jorge knew in another lifetime, he’s only reminded of the fact that _these are stories Jorge has lived with his whole life_ and that Minho too will have to go on living with it. Because although Minho waits with bated breath for the nighttimes when he can sit on the shore until Newt returns to him, in the end the sun still rises, even with the pain.

He doesn’t so much mind Brenda’s way of being there. Maybe that’s because she’s the only one who can just _be there_ without trying to do anything else. When Minho finds himself wandering away from the others, neglecting his work for the day in favor of finding somewhere quiet to sit, she sits with him. When they first got to the Safe Haven, Minho hated her because of how Thomas’ blood had cured her. It was irrational, and stupid, and entirely illogical, all of which were points he could imagine Newt making in his head even as Minho continued to hate her. Minho knows Brenda must have known this—he never said anything to her, but he knows she understood—yet it didn’t stop her from sitting with him. Maybe it was to make a point that there wasn’t any reason to hate her, maybe it was a way of saying she was sorry it was her who was saved and not Newt, or maybe it was just that she saw him wander off one day, saw that no one else was going to do it, and so decided to be the one to simply be there. He thinks that maybe it's easier for her to be there than the others because they didn’t really know each other before the Safe Haven, which means there isn’t anything at stake if she gets it wrong.

But even with Brenda there, none of it changes the fact that he is alone. He has his friends, thank god. He is in the Safe Haven, full of people, people who have fought hard to be there and who Minho cares deeply about. But he is alone. And he will never not be alone again, because he does not have Newt. So each night, rather than joining his friends in the hammocks and staring at the stars until they can’t hold their eyes open any longer, he goes to the sea. He listens to the waves crash and waits for their rhythm to put him to sleep, begging silently, _please, just one more time, can we go on like it once was?_

Thankfully or not, the waves always listen, returning Newt to Minho for as long as the moon shines in the sky.


End file.
